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Skip-Descant

Skip Descant

Senior Writer

Skip Descant writes about smart cities, the Internet of Things, transportation and other areas. He spent more than 12 years reporting for daily newspapers in Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana and California. He lives in downtown Yreka, Calif.

Buoyed by unprecedented federal funding as well as a widely accepted understanding that Internet is a fundamental part of modern life, states and cities confront the remaining obstacles to getting everyone online.
Cities are no longer seeing their miles of streetscape as cheap parking spaces. Curbs are now considered some of the most in-demand pieces of urban real estate, and technology is stepping up to help manage them.
Despite the staying power of remote work, traffic congestion in the United States remains stubbornly high, with New York City ranking as the single most congested city in the world.
Providers around Fort Worth, Texas, and the San Francisco Bay Area are using technology to expand on-demand options for riders. The availability can help connect first- and last-mile areas that lack service.
The Oregon Department of Motor Vehicles is using a new real-time customer management system known as Next in Line in 59 field offices, helping to improve wait times for more than 3 million.
Some 75 percent of low-income residents in Philadelphia, for example, say that they cannot afford to pay more than $21 a month for a broadband subscription.
Federal approval of the state’s Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment program smooths the way for the grant application process to open to Internet service providers, expected in late summer.
As ridership continues to lag amid a stubbornly slow recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, cities experiment with free rides and micromobility to prove public transit’s worth in worsening financial conditions.
New technologies in contactless fare payment systems enable riders to not carry cash and can save them money through features like fare-capping. And for transit systems, they can be an informational gold mine.
The Autonomous Robotic Pickup Platform, a project launching next week in Detroit’s Transportation Innovation Zone, will start by testing small sidewalk delivery bots to collect food waste for compost.